My Beating Teenage Heart (10 page)

Fuck
. That does hurt. The cut doesn’t start to bleed until a few seconds after the fact and then it stings like a nick you make with a razor, only those nicks aren’t usually two inches long. Will it leave a scar? I don’t think it’s deep enough for that. I let my shirt fall to cover the mess and then head for the bathroom where I press a wad of toilet paper against my side until it quits bleeding.

We have plenty of bandages since the accident with my hand and I stick a fresh dressing on my side and tape it in place the same way a doctor would. It’ll be fine, I’m sure. It’ll heal no problem. I don’t even know why I bothered.

It’s a sick thing to do.

The more I think about it the stupider it seems. It’s bad enough to do a stupid thing once but this second time is pathetic. Downstairs I can hear the dishwasher running and the TV up loud but I don’t want to be around my parents or Lily, especially after the fucked-up thing I just did.

I don’t know
what
to do. I can’t do my homework. Can’t be around my family. Can’t stop thinking all the wrong things.

I wish there was a way to just shut down and not feel or think anything. Just stop.

And then I hear my cell ringing across the hall in my bedroom and I know it’s Jules. I don’t really believe in ESP but sometimes I can tell it’s her. I wouldn’t pick up for anyone else right now and I don’t want to talk but if there was a way to just listen to the sound of her voice …

I go back to my room and snap up the phone before it can go to message. It’s Jules, all right, and my heart thumps faster as I think about telling her what I just did.

“Hi,” I say quietly.

“Hi,” Jules says. “Have you seen the weather out there? It’s crazy. I just saw a lightning bolt strike the ground in the yard across the street.”

I listen for the rain and she’s right, it’s pouring outside. Thunder rumbles outside my window like the storm’s being choreographed for my benefit. “I had my headphones on,” I lie. “I didn’t even notice.”

“Oh!” Jules says, like this is an interesting piece of information. “What are you listening to?”

Before last Friday happened I was in a four-month-old phase where I wouldn’t listen to anything recorded after 1979. A while back I figured out that a lot of the stuff I like sounds derivative of older rock, pop and soul anyway and decided to spend some time going straight back to the source.

“Blue Oyster Cult,” I lie again. “And then some Smokey Robinson.”

“Cool,” Jules says.

“Yeah … hey …” I sit on the bed, flexing the fingers that peek out of my bandage. “Do you think I could get a couple more of your dad’s pills tomorrow?” This isn’t something I really want to ask Jules but I can’t imagine her telling me no. I should’ve checked my parents’ medicine cabinet while they were out the other day and stolen some of whatever they have. Then I wouldn’t have to bring this up. But they’re home so often lately that I don’t know when I’ll get another chance.

Jules pauses before replying, “Not too many because I don’t want him to notice but, yeah, I guess I can get you a few more.”

I don’t say anything about the scissors, I listen to Jules tell me about a book her friend Renee lent her. Then she starts remin k stem">iscing about when we first got to know each other on the New York trip. I know all the details and I love Jules and how she can make the smallest thing seem amazing. But anything I feel about her now is through layers of fog. The feelings can’t really reach me.

I try to go through the motions at school the next day. None of the teachers care whether I’ve done my homework or not or call on me to answer questions. They act like I’m made of very thin glass and shouldn’t be disturbed.

After classes I head over to Jules’s house with her and she gives me another handful of pills. At the end of the weekend Lily goes home to Sunita and although Lily’s not a loud person, the house is so much quieter and emptier without her. Before she leaves she says that my grandparents are going to be around a lot and that she’s going to call and email and I should come up to see her and Sunita in Ottawa some weekend.

I tell her sure, that I’ll do that, and I try to keep doing the school thing, because I know I should keep busy, but by Tuesday—my fourth day back—I’m skipping classes. Tuesday it’s just social science, Wednesday’s the whole day except homeroom and Thursday it’s the afternoon. Mostly I just drive randomly in any direction, pulling on and off the highway until I need to eat. One day I end up at Niagara-on-the-Lake, which is so picturesque that it looks more like a theme park they’d sweep clean and lock the gates on at night than a place anyone could actually live. Another time I try to watch an “us vs. menacing aliens” movie at the multiplex but it’s not any easier than doing homework.

Anything other than walking, breathing or driving is beyond my capability, and while a small piece of me wants to pile on the distractions until I can’t see out from under them, the larger part knows that no matter what I’m doing there’ll always be too much time without her. It’s an endurance test I can’t win.

I still think about going away someplace my parents would never find me but I know I won’t, that I’ll keep doing these empty things over and over again until the end. Trying to hide from something that doesn’t have to catch up to me because it’s never left behind. I may as well be in the worst place imaginable—the one she’s missing from the most—because I can’t make her absence hurt any less. It’s like there’s no other choice but to run towards the pain.

So I do it. I leave the theater in the middle of a battle scene, drive home and tear up to her room, almost like there’s been some kind of mistake and she’ll be there, just like she would’ve been that Friday nearly two weeks ago, hours before we got to the part of the night when she walked into my bedroom and asked me to help her scour through dusty boxes in the basement to find what she was looking for.

“Hey, Skylar,” I’d say, before she even had the chance to get the question out. “Let’s go look through those boxes downstairs.”

And I’d never take my eyes off her. I’d go first and make sure she was careful. We’d rip into the cardboard and leave a mess that would make my mom purse her lips when she saw it later but Skylar would have what she needed. She’d be safe. We’d all be happy. Life wou kppymom purseld continue the way it was meant to only I wouldn’t take it for granted this time; I’d know how lucky I was.

I’d make any kind of deal to have a second shot at that.

I’d take six months left to live or a lifetime without legs to have that conversation with my sister again and do it right. I’d take anything.

And that is the way I rewrite history, sitting in Skylar’s room like a stone that will never stop falling, never stop sinking.

nine
                            
ashlyn

If I didn’t
know who Skylar was, her bedroom might make me guess she was a boy. She has the kind of bed you need to climb a ladder up to and a computer desk underneath it, maximizing space. The walls are painted aqua and decorated with two posters—one of the solar system and the other a photo of a polar bear lying down with its front paws folded up underneath itself. The bear’s staring straight at the camera as if observing the photographer, taking its own mental photograph. Lower to the ground, the majority of wall space has been dedicated to shelving and storage bins that are filled with action figures, racing cars, dinosaurs and other unidentifiable weird creatures. The pink beanbag chair under the window looks like it was intended for another room. I wonder if it was a gift from someone who didn’t know Skylar very well because there’s nothing else in the slightest pink about that room. There are some crafty and scientific-looking kits amongst Skylar’s things but not one thing that wouldn’t fit on either the boy or unisex shelves of a toy store.

As I take stock of Skylar’s room, I realize that while my younger self wasn’t quite as much of a tomboy as it appears that she was, I wasn’t a frilly girl either. While I’m still waiting for the majority of my own memories to fall into place, much of my early childhood has gradually returned to me. A bit more seeps back every day, in a roughly chronological order. I now know that at Skylar’s age I liked dinosaurs as well as dolls and that I had an illuminated ant habitat that glowed in the dark. My sister, Celeste, who only likes pretty insects such as butterflies and ladybugs, deemed it “kind of gross” but I bet Skylar would’ve liked it. I bet she would’ve wanted me to take it into the bathroom, away from any natural light, close the door and flick the light switch off so we could watch the ants’ industrious little tunnels glow green against a black backdrop.

Sometimes I wonder, if I’m here watching Skylar’s family, does that mean she’s over in Cherrywood, watching mine? Considering that what’s left of me revolves around the space Skylar left behind, it doesn’t seem right to me that we can’t meet. Given our deceased states you’d think that, at least, should be possible.

I conjure the image of Skylar’s face from various photos I’ve seen around the Cody house and whisper her name in my mind, trying to coax her towards me. I’ve taken to talking to Breckon recently too, or rather, nppymohous
thinking
to Breckon. He worries me most when he’s alone because then I’m not sure what he’ll do. At times his eyes fill with desolation, his neck and shoulders become rigid and the sound of his breathing crackles against the air. It seems to me that the atmosphere around us could turn to ice, break into shards and drown him.

Breckon has that very look in his eyes now, in Skylar’s room. He’s been sitting motionless in the middle of the beige carpet for the last twenty-seven minutes, color draining from his skin until it’s a pasty shade of white that makes him look more like a ghost than I do. Moose, who was a step behind Breckon as he flew up the stairs, attempted to climb into his lap but was instantly dislodged. Instead he sits two feet away, as near as Breckon will tolerate.

The dog is company whether Breckon wants it or not. I’m not even a voice, not even a wisp of a thing, but I stay close to him and say, as I’ve said before lately, “She wouldn’t want this.” I
think
the message in as reassuring a tone as I can muster and for that, my mother is my example.

When I was small she’d sense, when I was too quiet, that something was wrong and would lay her hand on the top of my head and say, “Why so glum, chum?” I wasn’t sad very often back then but there were instances when I measured myself against my sister and knew I fell short. At a friend’s sixth birthday party I leaned back in my chair and one of the slats broke as the chair crashed to the floor with me in it. While visiting my grandmother, sometime during that same year, I picked the dead leaves off one of her plants, and with the unhealthiest plucked started in on those next in line until soon the plant was almost bald, only five green leaves clutching sadly to its stem.

At times like those I was harder on myself than my grandmother or my friends’ parents were; I knew Celeste would never make such mistakes. But my mom’s warm voice, the tickle within it that reached out to cheer me up, would lift my spirits again.

So this is what I do with Breckon. I think of what my mother would tell him if he was me. Often I tell him that Skylar’s okay and that he doesn’t need to worry about her. I don’t know that for certain but considering my own circumstances I’m fairly confident that Skylar’s personality still exists—swimming amongst the stars maybe or hovering around someone else’s bedroom the way I am now.

I know Breckon doesn’t hear me or feel my presence but I can’t stop trying. Moose and I have that in common.

Breckon’s still in Skylar’s room, in almost a trance state, when his father arrives home. He doesn’t hear Mr. Cody’s approach and it’s not until his dad’s standing in the open doorway that he takes any notice.

Breckon’s father looks much older than he does in the family portrait hanging in the kitchen. He’s folded his shirtsleeves up and his tie has been loosened and hangs askew. “Here you are,” he says with a twinge in his voice.

At first Breckon remains still. Then he takes another moment to collect himself, stretching out his hand to run it over Moose’s fur. “Did school call you?”

“They say you’ve been missing classes all week,” Mr. Cody confirms.

“Not all classes.” Breckon’s eyes are on Moose rather than his father.

Mr. Cody jangles his keys in his pocket. His eyes skim Skylar’s room and hold on the WALL-E robot in the farthest corner.

“We should just … leave it,” Breckon murmurs, motioning to the room. “Leave everything how it is right now.”

Mr. Cody steps inside Skylar’s bedroom and picks up the nearest dinosaur, a poseable protoceratops. He pries open its jaws and then snaps them shut again. “No one’s going to change anything,” he says. “Not anytime soon.”

My mind begins to drift as Breckon and his father speak, my personal history beckoning me. Until this second I didn’t remember Farlain Lake, yet I went there with my cousins several years in a row. My dad’s friend lent us his cottage for two to three weeks every summer while he wasn’t using it. Aunt Sandra, who had fallen in love with my future uncle Ian in Edinburgh while discovering her Scottish roots, would fly back from Scotland with her family to go to Farlain Lake with us.

My cousin Ellie was half a year older than my sister, and from our very first visit there they were inseparable. Ellie and Celeste tried to negotiate a bedroom swap that would result in them sharing a room while I bunked with Ellie’s brother, Callum, who, though only fifteen months older than me, seemed to find me babyish.

At least, this is what I had put his reluctance to play with me down to when I was six. As a result, when my parents consulted me about the proposed swap, I told them I didn’t want to share a room with a boy. I was so sorry for that the following year that it stuns me to think that I could ever have forgotten about those summers. The next year, when I was seven—while Ellie and Celeste would do fashion shows on the sand, play badminton together and hog the DVD player watching movies starring teenage guys they pretended to drool over more than I imagined they really did—I’d beg my dad or Uncle Ian to take me out in the canoe or plead with Mom or Aunt Sandra to watch me swim. Sometimes all us kids (except my brother, Garrett, who was too young) would play a four-person version of baseball or, on a rainy day, have a game of hide-and-seek in the cottage, but I would’ve spent the better part of that second holiday struggling to keep myself busy or hanging out with the adults, if not for the change in Callum.